Returning to Ground from the Web's Clouds

The Net as we know it today first became visible to me in March 1994, when
I was among several hundred other tech types gathered at Esther Dyson's PC
Forum conference in Arizona. On stage was John Gage of Sun Microsystems,
projecting a Mosaic Web browser from a flaky Macintosh
Duo, identical to
the one on my lap. His access was to Sun over dial-up.

Everybody in the audience knew about the Net, and some of us had been on it
one way or another, but few of us had seen it in the fullness John
demonstrated there. (At that date, there were a sum total of just three
Internet Service Providers.) James Fallows was in the crowd,
and he described
it this way for
The Atlantic:

In the past year millions of people have heard about the Internet, but few
people outside academia or the computer industry have had a clear idea of
what it is or how it works. The Internet is, in effect, a way of combining
computers all over the world into one big computer, which you seemingly
control from your desk. When connected to the Internet, you can boldly
prowl through computers in Singapore, Buenos Aires, and Seattle as if their
contents resided on your own machine.

In the most riveting presentation of the conference, John Gage, of Sun
Microsystems, demonstrated the World Wide Web, the gee-whizziest portion of
the Internet, in which electronic files contain not only text but also
graphics and sound and video clips. Using Mosaic, a free piece of
"navigator" software that made moving around the Web possible, Gage clicked
on icons on his screen exactly as if he were choosing programs or
directories on his own hard disk. He quickly connected to a Norwegian
computer center that had been collecting results during the Winter Olympics
in Lillehammer and checked out a score, duplicating what Internet users had
done by the millions every day during the games, when CBS-TV was
notoriously late and America-centric in reporting results.

Note the terms here. John used Mosaic to "control",
"boldly prowl" and
"navigate" his way around the Web, which was
the "gee-whizziest portion" of the
Net.

That portion has since become conflated with the whole thing. Today we use
browsers to do far more than navigate the Web. Protocols that once required
separate apps—file transfer, e-mail, instant messaging—are now
handled by browsers as well. We now also can use browsers to watch
television, listen to radio and read publications. It's hard to name anything
a computer can do that isn't also doable (and done) in a browser. Serving
up most of those capabilities are utility Web services, provided by Amazon,
Apple, Dropbox, Evernote, Google, Yahoo and many more, each with their own
clouds. The growth of the Web, atop the Net, also has provided a conceptual
bridge from computers to smartphones and tablets. Today nearly every mobile
app would be useless without a back-end cloud.

While relying on the Web and its clouds has increased the range of things
we can do on the Net, our freedom to act independently has
declined. The
browser that started out as a car on the "information
superhighway" has
become a shopping cart that gets re-skinned with every commercial site it
visits, carrying away tracking beacons that report our activities back to
centralized servers over which we have little if any control. The wizards
among us might be adept at maintaining some degree of liberty from
surveillance, but most muggles are either clueless about the risks or make
do with advertising and tracking blockers. This is less easy in the mobile
world, where apps are more rented than owned, and most are maintained by
vendor-side services.

Thus, we've traded our freedom for the conveniences of centralization. The
cure for that is decentralization: making the Net personal, like it
promised to be in the first place—and still is, deep down.

Today this looks like your e-mail on a Google server—or your photos on
Instagram or your tweets on Twitter. There's nothing wrong with any of
those, just
something missing: your independence and autonomy.

May I just say what a relief to find someone who genuinely understands what they're discussing
on the web. You actually realize how to bring an issue to light and
make it important. More and more people should look at this and understand this side of
your story. I was surprised you are not more popular since you certainly possess the
gift.

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